Download or read book The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Culture of Europe written by Peter I. Barta and published by . This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of communism in Europe has tended to be discussed mainly in the context of political science and history. This book, in contrast, assesses the cultural consequences for Europe of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the book examines the new narratives about national, individual and European identities that have emerged in literature, theatre and other cultural media, investigates the impact of the re-unification of the continent on the mental landscape of Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, and explores the new borders in the form of divisive nationalism that have reappeared since the disappearance of the Iron Curtain.

Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Download or read book West Germany and the Iron Curtain written by Astrid M. Eckert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them.

Download or read book Cultural Exchange and the Cold War written by Yale Richmond and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Download or read book Imposing Maintaining and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain written by Mark Kramer and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

Download or read book The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Culture of Europe written by Peter I. Barta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of communism in Europe has tended to be discussed mainly in the context of political science and history. This book, in contrast, assesses the cultural consequences for Europe of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the book examines the new narratives about national, individual and European identities that have emerged in literature, theatre and other cultural media, investigates the impact of the re-unification of the continent on the mental landscape of Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, and explores the new borders in the form of divisive nationalism that have reappeared since the disappearance of the Iron Curtain.

Download or read book Stalin and the Fate of Europe written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History written by Dan Stone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postwar period is no longer current affairs but is becoming the recent past. As such, it is increasingly attracting the attentions of historians. Whilst the Cold War has long been a mainstay of political science and contemporary history, recent research approaches postwar Europe in many different ways, all of which are represented in the 35 chapters of this book. As well as diplomatic, political, institutional, economic, and social history, the The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History contains chapters which approach the past through the lenses of gender, espionage, art and architecture, technology, agriculture, heritage, postcolonialism, memory, and generational change, and shows how the history of postwar Europe can be enriched by looking to disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy. The Handbook covers all of Europe, with a notable focus on Eastern Europe. Including subjects as diverse as the meaning of 'Europe' and European identity, southern Europe after dictatorship, the cultural meanings of the bomb, the 1968 student uprisings, immigration, Americanization, welfare, leisure, decolonization, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, and coming to terms with the Nazi past, the thirty five essays in this Handbook offer an unparalleled coverage of postwar European history that offers far more than the standard Cold War framework. Readers will find self-contained, state-of-the-art analyses of major subjects, each written by acknowledged experts, as well as stimulating and novel approaches to newer topics. Combining empirical rigour and adventurous conceptual analysis, this Handbook offers in one substantial volume a guide to the numerous ways in which historians are now rewriting the history of postwar Europe.

Download or read book 20 Ground Breaking Directors of Eastern Europe written by Kalina Stefanova and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Directors have long been the main figures on Eastern European stages. During the last three decades some of the most outstanding among them have risen to international stardom thanks to their ground-breaking productions that speak to audiences far beyond local borders. Not by chance, a considerable number of these directors have won the second-biggest theatre award on the continent – the European Prize for (New) Theatrical Realities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the top directors of the region have been pushing contemporary theatre as a whole ahead into new territories. This book offers informative and in-depth portraits of twenty of these directors, written by leading critics, scholars, and researchers, who shed light on the directors’ signature styles with examples of their emblematic productions and outline the reasons for their impact. In addition, in two chapters the selected directors themselves discuss their artistic family trees as well as the main stakes theatre faces today. The book will be of interest to theatre scholars, students, and anybody engaged with theatre on a global scale.

Download or read book Beyond the Divide written by Simo Mikkonen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations, and individuals who brought people from the East and the West together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and others.

Download or read book The Icon Curtain written by Yuliya Komska and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iron Curtain did not exist—at least not as we usually imagine it. Rather than a stark, unbroken line dividing East and West in Cold War Europe, the Iron Curtain was instead made up of distinct landscapes, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. This book traces a genealogy of one such landscape—the woods between Czechoslovakia and West Germany—to debunk our misconceptions about the iconic partition. Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europe’s oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two long-standing German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the century’s most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germany’s quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtain’s better-known segments. Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.

Download or read book Gaming the Iron Curtain written by Jaroslav Svelch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc. Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.

Download or read book Cold War Broadcasting written by A. Ross Johnson and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It was not a matter of propaganda ... black and white ideological broadcasts ... What made [Radio Free Europe] important were its impartiality, independence, and objectivity."---Vaclav Havel "Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were critically important weapons in the free world's competition with Soviet totalitarianism---and without them the Soviet bloc might even have not disintegrated ... The account in this book of their activities is therefore not only informative, but critical to understanding recent history."---Zbigniew Brzezinski "The studies and translated Soviet bloc documents published in this book demonstrate the enormous impact of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America during the Cold War. By promoting democratic values and undermining the monopoly of information on which Communist regimes relied, the Radios contributed greatly to the end of the Cold War."---George P. Shultz "I know of no other mass media organization that has done more than RFE/RL to help create the Europe in which we live today---a Europe not divided into two opposing camps."---Elena Bonner Examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.

Download or read book The Cold War A Very Short Introduction written by Robert J. McMahon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The Cold War dominated international life from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But how did the conflict begin? Why did it move from its initial origins in Postwar Europe to encompass virtually every corner of the globe? And why, after lasting so long, did the war end so suddenly and unexpectedly? Robert McMahon considers these questions and more, as well as looking at the legacy of the Cold War and its impact on international relations today. The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction is a truly international history, not just of the Soviet-American struggle at its heart, but also of the waves of decolonization, revolutionary nationalism, and state formation that swept the non-Western world in the wake of World War II. McMahon places the 'Hot Wars' that cost millions of lives in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere within the larger framework of global superpower competition. He shows how the United States and the Soviet Union both became empires over the course of the Cold War, and argues that perceived security needs and fears shaped U.S. and Soviet decisions from the beginning—far more, in fact, than did their economic and territorial ambitions. He unpacks how these needs and fears were conditioned by the divergent cultures, ideologies, and historical experiences of the two principal contestants and their allies. Covering the years 1945-1990, this second edition uses recent scholarship and newly available documents to offer a fuller analysis of the Vietnam War, the changing global politics of the 1970s, and the end of the Cold War. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book Planning in Cold War Europe written by Michel Christian and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis. During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes. First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries. The volume thus contributes to two fields undergoing a process of profound reassessment: the history of modernisation and of the Cold War.

Download or read book Parting the Curtain written by Walter L. Hixson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-01-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Washington policymakers aspired to destabilize the Soviet and East European Communist Party regimes by implementing programs of psychological warfare and gradual cultural infiltration. In focusing on American propaganda and cultural infiltration of the Soviet empire in these years, Parting the Curtain emerges as a groundbreaking study of certain aspects of US Cold War diplomacy never before examined.

Download or read book The Collapse written by Mary Sarotte and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West. The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident. In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin. We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control. Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.